Rendering materials with complex 3D structure

natural objects, such as people and other creatures in everyday
environments, is by using accurate models for light reflection.
These images are currently demanded by the film industry, but
with advances in real time graphics the same demands will soon
come from games. Another increasingly significant set of users
cares about appearance in the real world: cosmetics, textiles,
printing, and other industries are reaching a level of modeling
sophistication where they need accurate appearance simulations to
understand how to control the appearance of their products.

Many manmade materials are easy to simulate because of their
simple structure, which has led to the classic model of
lambertian diffuse plus microfacet specular reflection that has
been successfully used for decades in graphics and vision. The
work I'll discuss in this talk focuses on the materials that
don't have such simple structure: skin, hair, cloth, plants,
wood -- all these materials have complex, three-dimensional
structures that determine how light reflects from them. I'll
discuss two related threads: measuring and analytically modeling
reflection from structures like hair, wood, and cloth; and
numerically simulating light propagation through volumes of
scattering material -- such as hair, foam, or granular materials
-- that are too complex to treat as surfaces but too
coarse-grained to treat as volumes.

Joint work with Adam Arbree, Piti Irawan, Jon Moon, Bruce Walter,
and Steve Westin.